Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance, and Dissent [Hardcover]

This book explores Alan Moores career as a cartoonist, as shaped by his transdisciplinary practice as a poet, illustrator, musician and playwright as well as his involvement in the Northampton Arts Lab and the hippie counterculture in which it took place. It traces Moores trajectory out from the underground comix scene of the 1970s and into a commercial music press rocked by the arrival of punk. In doing so it uncovers how performance has shaped Moores approach to comics and their political potential. Drawing on the work of Bertolt Brecht, who similarly fused political dissent with experimental popular art, this book considers what looking strangely at Alan Moore as cartoonist tells us about comics, their visual and material form, and the performance and politics of their reading and making.

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. the Marks of the Arts Lab: Comics, Performance, and the Counterculture

Chapter 3. the Play of the Press: Cartooning, Materiality, and the Underground in Print

Chapter 4. the Sound of the Underground: Comics, Music and the Politics of Punk

Conclusion

Central to Grays study is how Moore approached his cartoons through the lens of comics as performance & . The biggest strength of Grays writing and research lies in her ability to not only analyze Moores early cartooning work, but to first provide in-depth and insightful contextual sketches of the individuals, publications, and bands that affected Moores work. (Jeremy M. Carnes, Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, Vol. 3 (1), 2019)

Maggie Gray is Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, UK.

Researches an academically disregarded body of work, both in terms of Moore's early work and the history of British comics

Offers a distinctive approach to the l#h